


Revisions

by Trismegistus (Lebateleur)



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-06 16:43:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5424401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lebateleur/pseuds/Trismegistus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love and friendship, like learning another language and everything else in life, require practice to perfect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revisions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Raven (singlecrow)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/gifts).



Mori lifted the pincers and held them over the workings. A tiny screw, its threads invisible to the naked eye, was clasped between the needle-fine points. He drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly and evenly, willing his hand not to shake as he lowered the screw into place.

Then he sighed and set it down on the table.

'I haven't said a word!' Thaniel protested.

Mori removed the loupe from his eye. 'You thought about it very strongly, which in this instance was as good as saying it,' he responded dryly.

Thaniel looked crestfallen. He always did whenever Mori made clear that something he hadn't actually done was interfering with Mori's work. It was endearing. He had met very few people who felt bad when such things happened. Most people were just frightened, and then pretended to be angry.

'At least now I have a half-finished watch in two pieces on the table, instead of hundreds of tinier pieces on the floor.' He considered his memories of Thaniel's reactions to everything he could do next, then gave him a mock cuff on the arm. Thaniel's hand jerked his pen across the page, leaving a jagged line across the columns of characters he had been drilling while Mori worked. The writing was precise and therefore somewhat childish to Mori's eye.

'There, now we're even,' he said archly.

Thaniel looked at the page for a moment in chagrin, then smiled. 'I doubt any of this will end up sticking anyway,' he said ruefully. 

Mori blinked. 'Is that what you were about to get so upset about?' he asked curiously.

Thaniel looked at him, his own expression curious. 'You didn't already know?'

He considered for a moment. 'There were several things, and I didn't think that was the one you would pick. But I'm forgetting the others now that you haven't chosen them.'

Thaniel was still looking at Mori, but without actually looking _at_ him anymore, his eyes on some far away horizon. 'Oh, there's lots of little things these days,' he said, his gaze darting momentarily to the newspaper, and the article they had both avoided mentioning thus far. His lips quirked sheepishly. 'But these bloody things really are what's put me out of sorts just now.'

Mori almost responded automatically that Thaniel was being silly, then stopped. He was actually being quite serious, to the point that a flippant remark from Mori would put him off his studies for weeks. He could recall it quite clearly now.

It was rather out of character for Thaniel, who set to drilling whatever Mori set for him intently and was thus making remarkable progress, although not as much as when Mori had been feeding him the precise constructions and vocabulary he would need to sail through that day's dealings at the Foreign Office.

'If you're waiting for me to tell you it gets easier, I won't,' Mori said after a while, and left it for Thaniel to decide whether he was speaking about the character drills or something else. He turned and began to put the partially assembled clock away. He could see that he wouldn't be working on it any more for now, no matter what Thaniel ultimately decided to do next. 

Mori placed the half-assembled timepiece and its components carefully into their individual drawers and turned back to Thaniel, who had begun to say something about not understanding why people had to make things unnecessarily complicated; it might also have been about the characters or something else entirely, but Mori was no longer listening. He could only look in wonder as he recalled a multitude of futures and discovered that Thaniel was in every one.

It still caught him off guard, for all that it had been happening ever more frequently over the last eight months. He crossed the workroom floor and pulled Thaniel toward him so that his head was resting against Mori's chest. 

Thaniel looked up at him with a smile on his lips and the watchful stillness in his eyes that others mistook for passivity. I wouldn't normally ask, Thaniel said, but can you at least tell me how long it will be before I remember how to write these blasted things without it bringing on a headache? 

'How did we meet?' Thaniel asked. 

He blinked. 'Weren't you about to ask me something else?' he said, his head swimming with the sense of having suddenly come untethered that overtook him whenever Thaniel switched course abruptly. 

'I was,' he said, smiling. 'But I'm tired of wracking my brains over whether "to investigate" needs the tree or the water radical on the left. And anyway, I'm much more interested in this topic.' He paused for a moment, considering. When he spoke next, his tone was much more thoughtful. 'You've never actually told me how.'

'How? You barged into my shop after some nationalists nearly blew you to bits and bled on my floor. I wouldn't have thought that the sort of thing one forgets.'

That earned him a sharp elbow in the side. 'Yes, I remember that bit quite well, thank you.'

Mori doubled over, feigning pain. 'Is that any way to treat the man who saved your life? Had I remembered it coming to this, I would have chosen someone else.'

'Yes, that's what I'm asking,' said Thaniel quietly. 'You saved my life - why me, specifically? I was far from the only man caught in the blast, and I'm sure there were others who deserved to meet that sort of end even less than I did. 

'But you chose _me_ , and at least half a year out.' His voice trailed off in the way men's voices do when their thoughts have left them behind.

'I'm sure you remembered something to make you go to all that trouble,' he said at last.

Mori was smiling, though he made sure he kept every hint of it from his voice. 'We hardly got off to a running start,' he informed Thaniel gravely. 'The first time we met, you laughed at me.'

'Why would I have done that?' Thaniel asked. Mori's smile softened. He rested his cheek on the crown of Thaniel's head and thought about how to begin.

Mori remembered his eyes suddenly, and that they were as ocean-grey as the hem of Takahiro's robes. He kept his head pressed to the floor as Takahiro strode by, hardly daring to breathe. The man had a long nose too, just like foreigners were rumored to have, but now that he remembered it, Mori didn't think it was at all long enough to merit the comparison to a tengu's. 

The room was uncomfortably silent and he straightened, but not quickly enough. Takahiro had noticed his distraction and taken it for mockery. He had only just been made head of the family, and was insecure in his position and thus especially sensitive to slights. Mori had been flung from the room by the wrists as Takahiro's retainers cringed, the _shoji_ door nearly coming off its runner as Takahiro slammed it behind him.

He crouched on the floor for a moment and waited to see if anyone would emerge to demand he return to the council. No one did, so he dragged himself back to his rooms. Once there he wrote it down. _There is a Western foreigner with grey eyes. His nose is long, like everyone says foreigners' noses are, but I don't think it looks especially ugly._

Mori paused, eyebrows knitting in concentration. Then he decided to add, _I think he will become my friend._ 'Excuse me,' one of the retainers said politely from outside the door, just as he lifted his pen to record the next bit. Master Kano had arrived and it was time to practice making tea. Suddenly other possibilities became likelier, and he forgot.

The war itself had been inevitable. Everyone had agreed that the barbarians must be driven out and that the Tosa were fools for agreeing to grant Yoshinobu any amount of influence. Mori, steeped in the family hatred of the Tokugawa since birth, shared their fervor perhaps all the more for being forbidden a sword himself. He'd filled an entire journal with memories of how Yoshinobu and his supporters had prevailed. Then he'd done what he could to steer things toward a different course. He didn't like to revisit those entries now. He was fairly certain his brothers had survived in some. 

They had always been kind to him, but then it was easy to be kind to a bastard half-sibling when there were five of you along with a healthy father still in his martial prime. What a disappointment it had been for everyone when word arrived of their noble deaths and the clan abruptly found itself in need of new leadership. 

It would have helped had Takahiro been equally tolerant, or failing that, at least stupid. But he was neither, and it had not escaped him that once the dust had settled the family's former bastard afterthought was standing far closer to the line of succession than he had been before. 

It made no difference that Mori wanted none of it, or at the very least could not recall a time when going on to lead the family wouldn't leave him worse off than he was now. But even his cousin having put himself in charge hadn't left him much to look forward to. Outcomes multiplied like gnats once adulthood had snared him in the complexities of fief and imperial politics, and a future full of loneliness was tightening its hold on him by the day, no matter what he did to try to stave it off. 

Weeks, then years went by, and changed very little as they went. Takahiro was never pleasant, but he had been especially vicious this afternoon, to the point where Mori had retreated from his cousin's rooms after Takahiro finished with him resolved to flee Hagi for good, even if it did mean dying exhausted and hungry several years later in a hovel in Etchu. 

In the entry on the page in front of him, his third eldest brother was preparing for his marriage to the daughter of a prosperous tradesman from Osaka, a state of affairs that was causing no small amount of consternation within the family. The memory had become so improbable that he could no longer even picture it as his eyes moved over the words; it was as though they'd been written down by someone else entirely. Well, of course they would seem to be. What exactly had he expected, given the present he'd ended up with? 

Mori tossed the journal onto his desk, aware he was stalling. If he really meant to end his days as a laborer, he might as well get on with it. He stood and paused as his eyes fell on an entry he'd recorded toward the back of the book, short enough to be insignificant, but written not too long before, judging by the ink. 

_...with grey eyes. His nose is long, like everyone says foreigners'..._

With a jolt he remembered weeks spent sick with the pitching of the ship, and the unpleasantness that has ensued once his presence aboard had been discovered. There had been men shortly after they arrived in England, come to deal with the oriental who'd tried to sneak into the country. 

One of them had grey eyes. Because he thought he'd recalled that man before, Mori spoke to him. He was aware of his hands shaking as he introduced himself and apologised for having caused them difficulty. He didn't know what else to say. 

The man laughed; they all did. Mori didn't have to comprehend the words to know that they were mocking the funny little Chinaman who couldn't speak a word of English. All but the grey-eyed man, who Mori thought had an inward-looking tilt to his smile, as though imagining how well he might expect to do in Mori's place. 

The smile turned to a grimace as he registered something one of the other men had said. Then it shifted again as he turned to Mori and addressed him directly, in a normal tone of voice as though they could each understand what the other was saying. Whatever it was he said, his colleagues' laughter stopped abruptly, and a man who spoke broken Japanese and said he was from the foreign office arrived soon after. 

There had been several more visits as they tried to determine what to do with Mori, a situation that grew vastly more complicated once they learned he was nobility, and that his even more impressively titled cousin didn't particularly care to have him back. The kind man never returned with the others, although Mori hoped he would.

Then an agreement was reached, and before long he was put on a ship back to Nagasaki. 

Mori put his hand over the page and the flood of memories stopped. The humiliation stung all the more for its having yet to occur. But all the same, he had just remembered that he would leave Japan. It had never occurred to him that he might. The Shogunate had only ever allowed a few rare foreigners as far as Dejima, and any Japanese foolish enough to leave the country could expect to be executed upon his return. 

And yet, he had just remembered he would travel all the way to England and back. And if he was going to go to all that trouble, he saw no reason why he shouldn't try to remain there. 

Of course, he would need to learn English - that fact at least had become abundantly clear. Mori took to wandering about outside the castle walls whenever the opportunity presented, trailing after anyone who looked as though he might have anything to do with trade in barbarian goods or ships. His efforts were wholly unsuccessful until the day the delegation arrived on behalf of the new government in the newly renamed capital, and demanded an immediate audience with Takahiro. 

Having had a strong premonition of what their visit boded, Mori slipped out the workman's gate with a vague notion of heading down to the port until thirst or nightfall drove him back. He wandered aimlessly through the market toward the seawall. The day was shaping up to be quite hot and the docks would smell strongly of rotting fish. Mori looked up just in time to see the man go by, and stared. He couldn't help it - he looked outlandish with his close-cropped hair and oddly cut Western clothes. But the longer Mori looked, the more he remembered. 

The man spoke English, or rather, had pretensions of doing so. He was rather fascinated with plants. But if Mori was willing to put up with it for a time, the man would eventually introduce him to a real foreigner. Things became hazy after that, but it was enough. 

Squaring his shoulders, Mori set off down the road after him. 

English hadn't seemed that difficult at first, but then, Nozaka hadn't really known how to speak it. Now that Mori had wrangled Nozaka's botanist friend, who was a proper foreigner, into tutoring him, he was being quickly disabused of that misapprehension. From its pronunciation and grammar to its writing system, English was a determinedly nonsensical language. Mori rubbed his hand over his eyes and tried to concentrate. He knew he must have wanted to learn for a reason, otherwise, he doubted he would have taken the trouble to begin at all. But it was difficult to remember why that might have been during moments such as these, when for all his efforts he couldn't seem to make any progress whatsoever. He wondered if he really hadn't done it just to spite Takahiro, who had recently discovered how many of his vassals were trying to learn the language, and summarily banned it as a result. 

His tutor rapped him on the knuckles with his cane, as though he were a schoolboy and not nobility at all. 'Pay attention, Keita,' he said, and launched back into a convoluted explanation of how to distinguish between one of a thing and one of a thing when you wanted to be more specific about it. Mori was far from certain he understood what the explanation was getting at, but even had he been, he questioned why any conversation would require that level of detail when one's meaning was usually clear to begin with. 

It certainly didn't help that most of Hogg's lessons revolved around horticulture, that being the subject dearest to his heart and thus of most of the teaching material he had to hand. Perhaps sensing that he was about to lose his pupil for good, Hogg paused, then after a moment's deliberation took out his pocket watch. Mori had asked him about it early on, curious as to why he wore jewelry at his waist. 'Look,' he said, prising open the case to show Mori its workings. 'This is _a_ gear. And this is _a_ gear too. But this is _the_ gear that sends the second hand round. Do you understand the difference?' 

Mori leaned in closer to see. The inside of the case gleamed with gold and rubies, and tiny wires shaped as finely as the filigree of any courtesan's hairpiece. It captivated him more than English ever had. 'How does it work?' he asked. 

Encouraged by his pupil's attention, Hogg began to explain. Memories arose in Mori's mind as he spoke. There would be a village filled with Japanese, and a shop, and he needn't bother learning English at all. 

To the surprise of them both, Mori had a natural talent for machinery, one which he augmented by being able to recall in advance what innovations would work and what would not, and by unspoken agreement, spoken English was relegated to an afterthought as Hogg began to bring him whatever blueprints and technical studies he could get his hands on. Although Hogg never quite lost the paternalistic manner Mori was coming to recognise as a tendency shared by all foreigners in their dealings with Japanese, they got on much better now Hogg had recognised in him a fellow enthusiast of arcane subject matter. 

But whether out of a misplaced sense of responsibility or because he thought Mori's talent for clockwork might suddenly evolve into a desire to discuss it aloud, Hogg had never given up on his lessons entirely. Mori was putting up with it today in order to avoid the most likely alternative, which would involve having to take the Matsumoto whelp to the Tanabata festival. 

His efforts were not going well. 'No, that's not it at all,' said Hogg with mounting frustration. 

Mori shut his eyes. 'Thing. Think. Thick,' he tried again, sure he had it this time, but Hogg only looked at him mutely. Mori had hoped to rest on his laurels, having finally managed to master 'l' and 'r,' but all _that_ appeared to have accomplished was to give Hogg a renewed sense of optimism. Ever since, he'd redoubled his efforts to make Mori speak proper English and not even clockwork pears could dissuade him. 

Mori tried once more. 'What in God's name is so difficult about it?' Hogg demanded, flinging his hands into the air. 'Even children don't take so long to learn.' 

Mori was frustrated too. 'What does it matter if I can't,' he said haltingly. But the images were forming in his mind even as he spoke. There would be some trouble involving one of the youths in the village. Men from the British government would come. As one of the higher-ranking English speakers among the residents, Mori would be prevailed upon to meet with them. 

Hogg was saying something cross in response, but Mori was no longer paying attention. The Englishmen stood in a ring around him, unsure where to begin. One of them introduced himself to Mori, who responded in kind. There was an awkward silence.

One of the other men elbowed the first in the ribs. 'Did he just call you "Samuel?"' Everyone laughed politely, as strangers do to smooth out awkward moments in formal situations. The first man turned back to Mori. 'That's _Th_ aniel,' he said, emphasizing the initial sound. His smile was kind.

It made Mori want not to disappoint him. That day's lesson ended with no real progress, but Mori was determined now. He spent the next several weeks seeking out seldom-used rooms where he could contort his lips and tongue into every shape he could think of while attempting to make that impossible sound. Eventually his efforts became an end of themselves. 

When a hazily recollected image of a foreign city by a fog-filled bay suddenly snapped into focus, as though he'd just selected the correct power of lens through which to view it, he knew he had just about got it right. As his pronunciation improved it became clearer that the government was sending a delegation abroad to study Western learning, and that he would be a member. Ito the tradesman's son was to be one of its leaders, and if Mori could impress him, Ito would invite him along. The future in which he remained in America had particular appeal. In it, he would study at the famous great school called Harvard, befriend a future president, and help negotiate the end of a war on Japanese terms.

Because he was going to spend so much time in places where no one spoke Japanese at all, it became easier and easier to remember how to speak English. As with his clockwork, his skill grew by leaps and bounds. It wasn't long before he could recall all the mistakes he was going to make, and then not make them in the first place. 

It was the one bright expectation in his life, which made the wait for it intolerable. He filled an entire volume with all the things he might go on to do in America. He was outside the castle gate waiting for Ito on the day he arrived, and made sure to be in attendance when Lord Takahiro received him. There had been more elegant ways to assist Ito during his audience with the duke, the specifics of which began to elude him as soon as he set foot in the hallway after it concluded, blood welling from the hole where his tooth had been. Still, it had been worth the blow to watch the remaining futures where he didn't go to America evaporate like summer dew.

Ito had just got around to the subject now. He smiled. Memories were coming unbidden now, fast on each other's heels as they did when a once improbable future was setting into reality. Mori didn't need to consult his journals to remember Thaniel Steepleton. It was still ten years away, but they would meet in England. Mori would give him a watch. They were going to be friends.

Mori stopped speaking and gave Thaniel's shoulders a squeeze. 

'That was a long explanation filled with words I didn't understand,' said Thaniel at last. His voice was somewhat muffled by the wool of Mori's waistcoat.

'You might have said something,'' said Mori somewhat crossly, feeling quietly silly for having got so caught up in telling it he hadn't remembered what would happen.

'No, it's all right,' said Thaniel. 'I like listening to you speak Japanese. And anyway, you can always tell it to me again tomorrow. And keep at it until I understand it all.'

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Yuletide! Thank you, thank you for giving me the chance to play in this universe. This foray ended up with far more language learning than Labouchere Amendment, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.
> 
> ETA: My prompt asked for language difficulties, synaesthesia, and how Mori and Thaniel deal with the Labouchere Amendment. I love Japanese accents and was secretly sad Mori never had one in the novel, so it was great fun to give him one here. My take on the last prompt is that Thaniel being Thaniel, they talk around it for a bit _even though it's right there in the paper in front of you, oh my god, you two_ and then Thaniel changes the subject. Synaesthesia, alas, requires a Thaniel POV, but we know he's listening. :) )


End file.
